Bose’s amazing active suspension uses speaker technology

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No, it’s not a joke: Bose is building an active car suspension using loudspeaker parts and microprocessors. It could be the best suspension ever, if and when it comes to market. Bose believes it’s near the end of a 30-year R&D project that began when Jimmy Carter was president and just after Orson Welles said, “We [Paul Masson] will sell no wine before its time.” Based on test drives in Bose vehicles, the ride should be silky smooth without sacrificing handling. Most bumps wouldn’t be felt at all, the car could bank into a turn like an airplane, and it can regenerate electricity. But it will not be cheap.

An active suspension uses microprocessors and sensors to instantly adapt the suspension to road conditions. The common technology with loudspeakers is the coil and magnet: Run electricity from your music source through the coil in time with the music and the actuator moves the speaker cone in and out to form the music and words you hear. Mount a bigger version on the car in place of the shock absorber and it moves up and down to damp (soften) the bumps.

Sure, you also need a black box with enough processing power to interpret the bumps in the road and tell the suspension what to do. For that alone, says company founder Amar Bose, serious development work couldn’t get under way until the 1990s and the arrival of Intel Pentium-class CPUs.

“It’s going to be on a $100,000 car,” Bob Maresco, president of Bose, said earlier this month. Maresco was hired by Bose as a young engineer in the 1980s to work on the suspension project.

Bose unveiled the active suspension system in 2004 (see Bose Reimagines Auto Suspension), showed off its lab simulators, and demonstrated the suspension systems in a Lexus LS and Porsche 911. Bumpy roads smoothed out and the suspension also did away with body roll. The Porsche rolled over bumps so violent the test driver had to wear a helmet or risk a concussion from the jouncing that slapped his head against the side window. That was with a traditonal shocks-and-springs style suspension. With the Bose suspension, the driver was no longer a human pinball. In fact, Bose says, if the bump causes suspension travel of less than 8 inches, the occupants feel no change in the ride at all. That’s more than the suspension travel on most cars today.

Because a generation of Bose press announcements have started or ended with a gimmick, the company topped itself with two. The Lexus test car approached a railroad tie obstacle in the road. Rather than stop, the car kept rolling, hunkered down, then unleashed the energy in the suspension system and the car did a steeplechase leap to clear the obstacle. The driver stepped out, bowed, clicked his remote control, and the car bowed also. A gimmick, yes, but a memorable gimmick.

Back in 2004, Bose said it hoped to name an automotive partner in a year and have production vehicles late in the decade. There is an automaker on board now but the company is so-far unannounced. However, the list of suspects is short. Rolls-Royce and Bentley easily fit the bill as makers of $100,000-plus cars, but worldwide they only sold 2,711 and 5,117 cars, respectively, last year. On their own, that’s probably not enough volume to help Bose even begin to earn back its investment. But Rolls-Royce is owned by BMW Group and Bentley by Volkswagen, which also controls Audi. Porsche and VW have interlocking investments, so the Panamera sedan and Cayenne SUV could also figure into the mix despite their sub-$100,000 base prices. If the suspension was also fitted to their top-end sedans and big SUVs, volume would be significantly higher. Similarly, Mercedes-Benz has significant volume from its S-Class sedan plus a small number of sales of the Maybach ultra-luxury sedan. Lexus would be the most logical candidate among Japanese automakers. In the U.S., no Cadillac or Lincoln comes close to the $100,000 floor Bose describes.

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